On Monday, the Supreme Court supported a football coach from Washington State who wanted to pray on the field following games.
With a 6-3 decision, the judge sided with the coach. The judges ruled that the First Amendment protected the coach’s prayer.
Justice Neil Gorsuch penned the majority opinion, saying that “the Constitution and the finest of our traditions urge mutual respect and tolerance, not repression and suppression, for religious and nonreligious ideas equally.”
The issue had the judges struggle with how to strike a balance between students’ rights to be free from peer pressure to engage in religious rituals and teachers’ and coaches’ rights to exercise their free speech and religion. The conclusion might make some religious behaviors more acceptable in a public school environment.
The result is also the most recent in a string of victories for religious plaintiffs at the Supreme Court. Another recent instance was the court’s determination that Maine cannot exclude religious schools from a program that provides financial aid for private education. This ruling may make it easier for religious organizations to receive public funding.
It may not come as a surprise that the court found in favor of the coach. Four of the court’s conservatives agreed that a lower court judgment in favor of the school district was “troubling” for its “knowledge of the free expression rights of public school teachers” in 2019, even if the court declined to take the matter up at an early stage.
Joseph Kennedy, a Christian and former football coach at Bremerton High School in Bremerton, Washington, was the subject of the issue before the court. At first, Kennedy prayed by himself on the 50-yard line at the conclusion of games when he first began coaching at the school in 2008. But when more pupils joined him, he gradually started giving brief, motivational lectures that included allusions to religion.
Kennedy led students in prayers in the locker rooms for many years. In 2015, the school system became aware of what he was doing and requested that he stop.
Kennedy no longer led students in prayer in the locker room or on the field, but he still intended to pray there personally, with the option for others to participate if they so desired. After the game, the school requested that he cease his custom of kneeling and praying while still “on duty” as a coach due to worries that it would face legal action for breaching students’ rights to exercise their religion. Kennedy wanted to pray in private before or after the game, so the school sought to come up with a solution. The school placed him on paid leave when he proceeded to crouch and pray on the field.
The majority of the court’s judges attended Catholic schools, with the exception of three who attended public high schools.
Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, Case No. 21-418.